Immersive experiences have become something of a rage. Recently, Darkfield produced Séance at the Edinburgh Fringe. Here in L.A., Big City Forum recently offered Electric Soundbath as part of an experience for the “mystically inclined.”

Museums have been offering various forms of immersive experiences for a few years now. In 2012, the Barbican Centre in London offered “Rain Room,” which later went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then LACMA here in L.A. The Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery presented “Wonder,” and drew more audiences in a few weeks than it usually draws in a year.

Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrors” recently opened at The Broad here in L.A. to sold-out crowds. It explores Kusama’s famous Infinity Mirror Rooms. One of the most popular is “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity” and for half a minute, the viewer “disappears.”

Right now, we want immersive and the deeper and more sensory it is, the better.

A new sonic and sensory immersive installation in East Williamsburg at Founders Lab launched this month. Called Manifest 1.0, it is a series of physical installations created to explore sonic and visual art through multi-sensory experiences. The project is a collaboration spearheaded by Executive Producer Jordan Caldwell with the multimedia collective The Family. Manifest 1.0 is set in a world envisioned by singer-songwriter Sunni Colón in conjunction with his design agency, Tetsu.

Manifest 1.0 Performance

According to Caldwell, “Artists create from a subconscious place that is difficult to express or manifest physically. Manifest collaborates with musicians and artists to provide them a medium in which they can actualize their innermost creative energy in a physical space and where audiences can join them in discovering what it feels like to enter that space for the first time.”

Surface magazine reports that the installation explores perception and reality in an ethereal design that exists beyond the constraints of space and time. Caldwell says that, “Manifest 1.0 aims to unite participants from different backgrounds and life experiences as they travel together through varying realms – realized through light, sound and texture – in one place.”

We are living in the era of the extreme experiential. It is the search for something new and interactive. Engaging the senses to the nth degree helps create unforgettable memories and inspires the imagination and, ultimately, action.

Manifest 1.0 Experiences

Manifest 1.0 is on to something in this time of virtual reality, augmented reality, and experience design. Immersive and interactive experiences are the next dimension for music, film, art, video gaming, and theater. As the artist Francis Bacon used to say, “the job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.” Manifest 1.0 and other similar endeavors are doing just that, deepening what we know and feel, making experience even more mysterious and, in the process, even more inspiring.

Max Benavidez at The Taj Mahal. Crown of the Palace on the south bank of the Yamuna River. It is really a tomb in memory of a great love. The marble dome is the central focus of this amazing structure. It is a wonder to behold.

“Home—So Different, So Appealing,” a truly astonishing show at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA), captures dislocation, exploitation, despair, and division in work after work, in installation after installation. This show doesn’t explode in your face but gradually builds momentum with searing and striking images about poverty, isolation, discrimination, and death, the very things most people avoid, deny, or ignore. It’s intellectually rich and truly emotional, a multimedia exhibition where the hallowed concept and fluid context of home is dissected, split, deconstructed, and even floated in the air. At almost every turn and angle we find a fresh insight and a new revelation.

There is a fierce war of ideas taking place in the world right now between those who want to go forward and those who want to go backward. We see the signs of this in our own political discourse here in the States as well as throughout the world. Authoritarian forces are fighting on every front to set a regressive course while those who believe in freedom and the right to self-expression are making their own case. By virtue of the times we are living in, this show is on the frontline of that war and the artists gathered here in one place for one moment in Los Angeles are making the case for freedom in every sense through their art.

The fact that the artists are all Latino and Latin American is simply a fact, not the focus. Yes, the curators brought together these artists—whose works span several decades and art movements as well as cultural and national origins—because they are Latino or Latin American. That’s true. Perhaps the curators are making the case that modern and post-modern art in its myriad forms has been made at the highest levels by Latinos and Latin Americans. Period. But the overriding aim is to showcase the art created by these artists not their race or ethnic identity. In this way, “Home” goes far beyond the usual ethnic shows that offer nostalgic or stereotypical images of what it means to be something different. This show boldly presents strong aesthetic statements by exemplary artists.

“The Ghost of Modernity (Lixiviados)” (2012) by the Argentinian artist Miguel Angel Ríos is perfectly titled and one of the show’s standout works. To fully appreciate this piece, it helps to know what the Spanish word lixiviados means. Lixiviados are leachates, which are contaminated liquid materials usually found in landfills or dumpsites that are environmentally harmful especially when released into the atmosphere. Thus, modernity and its ghost, which in Ríos’ video, is a transparent cube that floats above and around the wooden and metal shacks that have landed from above with a thud amid the trash and detritus produced by our contemporary disposable society. The cube represents the ghostliness of space and the presence of invisibility. The video’s sound effects are just as jarring as the visual scenes themselves, especially at the end when women sweep the ground with hand-made straw brooms with an incessant scratching sound as if they were conducting a ritual meant to wipe away modernity with its contaminating ensemble of normative thinking and behavior.

The show’s theme of home comes together particularly well in one room where deconstructed animal-like furry furniture by the Latino American artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz is juxtaposed with a delicate centerpiece by Leyla Cardenas, a Colombian artist, who carefully sliced away and preserved a 4-inch piece of a wall and room from a 19th century house in Bogotá. The preserved specimen is composed of remnants of wallpaper, a wooden chair, table, floor, and a fluttering strip of ceiling. The thin, torn series of sheets of wallpaper represent the generations of people who have lived in a house and remind us of where we came from and the fragility of mortal memory. Together the works by these two artists create a sense of the fiber and fabric of the inner life of home and soul. This is a view of home from the inside out. Quite brilliant.

Another exceptional piece is by the U.S. Latino artist Daniel Joseph Martinez. “The House America Built” is an exact replica of the infamous Unabomber’s Thoreau-inspired cabin in the Montana woods but split in half and brightly painted in the Martha Stewart Signature Paint 2017 color scheme down to a side panel in camouflage in a sweet and upbeat palette that mocks the militaristic nature of the Unabomber’s dirty work. Your eyes are drawn to the curiously unbalanced cabin in much the same way that a colorful children’s playground and its toys might draw your attention but once you realize what it is, the dwelling of a violent intellectual and madman, a feeling of disquiet may arise. The Unabomber’s Manifesto is nearby in case you want to understand the ideas that drove his murderous obsessions.

“Home” is the first exhibition of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles/Latin America (PST: LA/LA) series of shows opening in Fall 2017. It sets such a high standard (no pun intended) that it will be interesting to see what the other exhibitions have to offer. While there are a few minor works and a couple of pieces in the show that while interesting do not rise to the occasion, this is still a major thematic exhibition of rare artistic quality not often seen gathered in one place.

The three co-curators of this show—Chon Noriega, Mari Carmen Ramirez, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas—have pulled off a major global artistic statement with “Home.”

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote that there are a thousand ways to go home again. This show lets you go home in so many profound and unexpected ways that the lingering impact makes it an unforgettable experience.

This building in Santiago de Compostela in Spain is a great example of wabi sabi.

Wabi sabi is an ancient aesthetic philosophy rooted in Zen Buddhism, particularly the tea ceremony, a ritual of purity and simplicity in which masters prized bowls that were handmade and irregularly shaped, with uneven glaze, cracks, and a perverse beauty in their deliberate imperfection.

When you see Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita at the end of the film, you wonder is ennui something that passes? Is it a momentary fleeting experience or is it deeper and something that stays with you through months, years or all your life? In other words, is there hope? And what exactly does hope mean?